Originally Posted by
DOUBLE BOGEY
Tiger fish, just my opinion but I don’t believe the crew fully understood or were aware of their situation until the first engine failed. Knowledge, understanding, comprehension leading to appropriate behaviour. When the knowledge or understanding is deficient......................
To me the most plausible explanation does seems to be that in fact the captions were not illuminated due to some fault in the panel or wiring. It seems incomprehensible that they just carried on as normal with all those lights on and nothing was said on RT or airwave.
I was involved in the Dutch accident enquiry into G-JSAR. One of the factors was an engine disturbance causing Ng fluctuations and intermittent illumination of DIFF PWR (or was it Diff Ng on the L2, can’t remember). Anyway all the various bits - anticipator, FCU, DECUs etc were sent off for analysis but no fault was found. But clearly something was wrong because there had been no previous cases of this sort of intermittent Diff Ng caption. The same applies to the reported control restrictions. No cause was ever found.
Of course the accident investigators don’t have the expertise and knowledge to test the equipment themselves, they have to rely on sending it to the manufacturer for testing. The manufacturers seem to put the equipment through routine testing such as might happen after manufacture or overhaul. It is not in their interest to determine that their specific piece of equipment was responsible for the accident and so I got the impression that the testing was superficial and minimal and certianly, they were not striving to prove that it was their equipment at fault. No doubt they didn’t lie, but they also perhaps didn’t expend as much effort as someone looking to prove something is faulty.